Category: Event Report

Yes, we’ve made it to the end of another successful Spectrum Scale user group! This year has been our most highly attended group with over 110 registrations and around a 90% attendance rate. We had representation from 56 organisations and delegates from 13 countries as well as 29 speakers over 28 sessions. A big thank you goes out to all our IBM, sponsor and user speakers.

For 2018, we headed back to London and the IBM Client Centre London on the South Bank. The client centre team rightly deserve our thanks – where nothing was too much trouble for them. Finding us cables to plug our streaming kit and generally making sure the logistics of the venue were all dealt with.

What a great start to new Spectrum Scale usergroups in Singapore, held at Supercomputing Asia at Resorts World Convention Centre.
There were a range of attendees, from private and public organisations, from Managing Directors to HPC Specialists and System Administrators, attending from countries pan-Asia-Pacific – India to China and Japan, to New Zealand and Australia.

As the conference theme and stream included AI and Data Analytics and Machine Learning, we had quite a few developers and sys admins who run various analytics workload on scale, but are looking to see what is new.

Well that’s it for the user group in 2017! The last event of the year was held as part of Computing Insights UK (CIUK) in Manchester this week. CIUK is a much smaller event that SC or ISC, but its where the user group’s roots are. In fact, the user group on 12th December 2017, was the 7th birthday of the group which held its first meeting (of about 8 people) at MEW (the forerunner of CIUK).

Since then the group has grown, and whilst the CIUK meeting is never as large as the main events, we still had 20-30 attendees.

We had well over 150 participants for the Spectrum Scale User Group at this year’s Supercomputing Conference held in Denver, USA, which took place on Sunday afternoon November 12, 2017.

A highlight of the event was several user talks, including Max Dellbrück Center, University of Pennsylvania Medical, DESY / European XFEL, and the University of Birmingham. We also heard about improvements to restriping and mmfsck, multiple enhancements resulting from CORAL work and other new features coming with Scale 5.0. We’re getting all the talks uploaded, so you can check out the details for yourself. We ran a little bit late as usual, but that was due to all the great questions from the audience. Thanks as always for making this an interactive event.

We’re looking for a site to host the next US event in the spring. If you’re interested in hosting, have ideas for a talk please reach out to Kristy or Bob at the US user group committee.

We had kind sponsorship from Mellanox and IBM Australia and we were hosted in the IBM offices in North Sydney, wonderfully close to good coffee and food and the train!

On Wednesday we kicked off with a fabulous whiskey and cheese night event hosted by Mellanox to allow some time to meet and discuss many aspects of operating Spectrum Scale, new projects and make connections nationally.